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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.I care very much, I'm afraid to say. If that information is not of interest to us then we should all just commit suicide and forget the human endeavour. If we only seek the knowledge which we can show to be of use to us then we condemn ourselves to a very limited horizon. Imagine....the ability to know how life comes about.
Irony is, this is the kind of pursuit that ends up pushing science forward and helping humanity anyway...
i agree, i would rather spend money on something that pushes science onwards than use the money on speed cameras and id cards!!
one question tho? how much did all this cost cos it said on sky news website earlier it cost �300billion, which i find a little too high for my thinking, did someone slip and stick a b on the illion instead of a m?
Not sure, but no way this cost many many billions. The trajectory would be very difficult to achieve, as well as the telemetry, but nothing on a huge scale like hubble. I would guess about 6 B?
Strange, I've been quite down (life's a bit rocky at mo). But this gave me a deep down buzz, I was just so happy about it, and proud of my generation. Comet coming by? We'll just punt up a we capsule, fire it at it, and take some pictures. 10000mph? No problem. The physics involved is incredible. What next? Cars that don't rust?
This is very important science.
Comets are amoungst the oldest things in our solar systems they are a chemical snapshot of what things were like when our planets were being formed.
By hitting it and analysing the flash we can tell exactly what its made of and by association the likely constituancy of the earth when life first started.
How life got going from simple chemistry is still one of the great unknowns and this is a small step on the road to discovering this.
"proud of a generation"
so proud that we can spend billions on finding out more about a comet - but still can't eradicate poverty / hunger / famine etc etc.
Seems we can find the money to explore the universe, fight wars but not to help other human beings.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for technology. The reason computers are so advanced is because of the space industry - however, I do wonder if that there should be other priorities.
Nice point, I think that needs to be stated. I think that feeding people should be the priority. However (and this is by way of explanation rather than excuse)..we are human beings...tribal warfare and selfish greed is part of the mix. I don't think we should accept this, but I think that as a result of this knowledge we should accept that despite our best efforts, the world will always be full of people who fail to get civilized. People are starving not because the west won't give, it's because Africa won't get with the program. The UK gave �220Billion over the last 20 years in aid to Africa. �220Billion was also the amount taken by corrupt Nigerian rulers from their very poor people over that time. So what should we do? Abandon our space research (fairly small in comparison?)
Why pick on space exploration at least that adds to the sum of human knowledge!
Sky gets half the cost of this mission in a year televising football in pubs and clubs!
And the UK spends six times this amount on ice cream in a year.
So don't compare research to famine relief there are a lot of things to cut before we stop unmanned space exploration
It's all to do with your interests. I'm happy to say that Astronomy is a subject which fascinates me. How anyone can not look upwards and question our existence baffles me.
And I'd rather the U.S. spend money on a subject in which millions of people have an interest, than $billions on a war nobody wants!
This is not really on the thread but jakey and bigdogzdodaah are geologists and I have been dying to ask......
isnt it true that the age of the comet was 4.5 bn years and there are some rocks on earth older? I have a figure of 15 in my mind. Anyway i thought it was a big thing that some rocks on earth are older than some estimates of the universe.....is this true and what's the solution to the paradox? thanks
PP
The oldest known rocks are Acasta Gneisses in northwestern Canada near Great Slave Lake 4.03 Billion years plus or minus a few percent, these were dated radiometrically and hence it's pretty acurate.
Comets are *believed* to have been formed at the same time as the solar system but trying to date one is a lot trickier. The chemical composition that we've seen so far is very similar to that of star forming nebulae and comets as debris from planetary formation fits pretty well although a few years there was some contractictory evidence based on the Giotto findings.
These questions are exactly why we need this sort of mission